The Charles Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street in London, one of Dickens' former residences, houses over 100,000 items relating to Charles Dickens. The collections include furniture, personal effects, paintings, prints, photographs, letters, manuscripts and rare editions. When they approached System Simulation with their needs for a collections management system, their goals were to reconcile and centralise collections information, and to enhance access to their collections.

We provided them with MuseumIndex+. Its ability to handle a diverse range of collection items in one unified system was an attraction. Louisa Price, Curator at the Dickens Museum, liked that she could perform a search and bring up first editions alongside manuscripts and film adaptations. She had used System Simulation products in previous roles at the Museum of Decorative Design and Architecture and the Geffrye Museum, and was reassured that System Simulation are a local company with a large community of users.

System Simulation also built a CollectionsOnline website, which has been made available internally, on computers in the Dickens Museum research room. This gives access to the collections to scholars, researchers, members of the public, staff, and volunteers. The same cross-collections search functionality from CollectionsIndex+ is available in CollectionsOnline. Objects are also grouped into “narratives”, “themes”, and “collections”, to provide context for those who might not be sure what they are looking for.